Share this story

James O'Keefe is a conservative activist who has made a name for himself with hidden camera investigations of supposedly liberal organizations. This week, he turned his attention to Twitter, publishing a series of secretly recorded videos of Twitter employees (and former employees) discussing Twitter's content moderation policies and political culture.

O'Keefe claims to have uncovered smoking-gun evidence of a far-reaching conspiracy to suppress conservative speech on the Twitter platform. Conservative media outlets have taken that frame and runwithit.

But there's a lot less to the two videos Project Veritas released this week than meets the eye. For example, O'Keefe has repeatedly highlighted Twitter engineer Steven Pierre's comment that Twitter was working on software to "ban a way of talking." The strong implication is that the "way of talking" Pierre wants to ban is conservative political speech. But if you actually watch the full video, that's clearly not what Pierre meant.

"Whether it's positive or negative doesn't look for content," he said. "It's more like if somebody's being aggressive or not. Somebody's just cursing at somebody."

In other words, Pierre was describing a project to filter out trolling and harassment. O'Keefe could have made this clear—or just left that clip on the cutting room floor. But O'Keefe is a political activist who often casts the targets of his investigations in the worst possible light—even if he has to use smoke and mirrors to do it.

Why it’s worth taking O'Keefe's investigations with a grain of salt

James O'Keefe has used the same basic playbook since 2009, when he made a name for himself catching representatives of the now-defunct liberal community group ACORN advising a client (actually an associate of O'Keefe's posing as a prostitute) on how to conceal her illegal prostitution business.

As O'Keefe's fame has grown, he's been able to raise money and recruit a growing army of staffers to carry out wide-ranging stings against a variety of targets. In recent months, his organization, Project Veritas, has focused on elite media institutions, with recent exposés focusing on the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN.

The group's basic approach is to talk to a wide range of people connected to an organization in hopes that a few of them will say things that sound bad. Project Veritas isn't very picky about who it targets for its sting operation. For example, in the group's exposé of the New York Times, O'Keefe quotes a Times IT consultant saying that people in the Times newsroom hate Trump.

If you talk to enough people at an organization with thousands of employees, it's inevitable that you'll catch some of them saying stuff that at least sounds bad. We don't know how many Twitter employees O'Keefe's organization talked to who didn't say anything embarrassing—or even directly contradicted O'Keefe's thesis that Twitter is systematically censoring conservatives.

What the Twitter videos showed

In total, Project Veritas has published comments by eight Twitter employees—all apparently without their knowledge or consent. While O'Keefe portrays all of these clips as evidence that Twitter is pushing a secret anti-Trump and anti-conservative agenda, most of the clips fall apart upon close examination.

Here's a full list of the eight people featured in Project Veritas video so far—and what they actually said.

Clay Haynes: "There's a reason why we have a subpoena process"

The first Project Veritas video focused on Clay Haynes, a senior network engineer at Twitter. The headline on that video focuses on Haynes saying that "we're more than happy to help the Department of Justice in their little investigation" against Donald Trump by turning over direct messages and other private information.

But the tape shows that when Haynes is urged to look at the private messages of Donald Trump and his son Donald Jr., Haynes laughs nervously and says, "We have a subpoena process for that very reason." In other words, Haynes's comments are entirely consistent with Twitter's official policy: that it only discloses private information about its users if it receives a court order to do so.

Olinda Hassan: "You need to also have control of your timeline"

As a Twitter policy manager, Hassan helps develop Twitter's regulations for issues like hate speech. In the video, a Project Veritas person says to her, "I've tried to, like, block people like Cernovich and stuff like that and mute and stuff like that, but they still show up." Hassan says that Twitter is "working on" the problem, with a goal to "get the shitty people to not show up." Hassan doesn't specify which "shitty people" she's talking about, and O'Keefe naturally insinuates that she's talking about an official Twitter blacklist of conservative pundits.

But in the same conversation, Hassan stressed that "you need to also have control of your timeline." In other words, there was no indication that this "shitty people" feature was limited to any one ideology or partisan affiliation. If you're a conservative user who wants to block a bunch of annoying liberal pundits, the same technology should allow that. It was the Project Veritas staffer, not Hassan, who asked about banning conservatives—and nothing Hassan said implied that the feature was limited to conservatives.

Conrado Miranda: "That's a thing"

A woman associated with Project Veritas said to Miranda, a former Twitter engineer, "I've heard talk that it's a good thing because they'll use it to ban, like, Trump supporters or conservatives, so I don't know if, like, that's just a rumor or if that's true."

"That's a thing," Miranda replied.

The problem is that Project Veritas edited the segment so that we don't know what what the woman said just before this exchange. That means we don't know what "it" is or who "they" are. For example, this could just be referring to technology that gives users greater ability to filter out tweets they find annoying—whether they're conservative or liberal. In his response, Miranda doesn't say anything more about political filtering, instead giving a high-level technical description of how content filtering works in general.

Seconding SixDegrees: every story covering this guy’s propaganda attempts needs to have this level of critical examination and reflection on past dishonesty. He may get better at covering up his true nature.

Yeah, O'Keefe and "Project Veritas" are the ones who heavily edit videos on subjects that Right Wingers get triggered by and claim them as truth. Right Wingers eat the stuff up and they will believe those videos even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary (see the Planned Parenthood video by them).

I can pretty much stop reading right at "James O'Keefe." The guy's a dumpster fire of misrepresentation and lies.

Good write up, though.

Sure, like "Mexicans are rapists" was a misrepresentation (he never said those words). And the presumption that Trump is racist. The avalance of misrepresentation of Trump is really quite extraordinary.

Or just yesterday:

""These are shocking and shameful comments from the President of the United States. There is no other word one can use but 'racist'," Mr Colville said."

..in reference to sh*thole countries. Again a preusmption of racism. What's weird in this instance is that democrats often call the US a sh*thole country, but that would then make them racist.

"A certain way of talking" is an awfully clunky way to say trolling etc. Why not just say that?

"and O'Keefe naturally insinuates that she's talking about an official Twitter blacklist of conservative pundits."

Yet she responded to the reference to Cernovich, an alt-righter, with 'shitty people'. hmmmmm.

While O'Keefe may not have proven anything, the leaning of Twitter does seem to be against conservatives.

It's presumption to say that Twitter is going to filter out conservatives but not so presumptuous to say that it's fake news.

Anyone who's not an insane racist has a "leaning" against Cernovich, who nonetheless has not been banned by Twitter. It would be no scoop to find an employee with a negative opinion of him in any organization this side of the KKK. If that's what happened here, it means nothing at all, unless every company has to employ only insane racists to be "fair".

I can pretty much stop reading right at "James O'Keefe." The guy's a dumpster fire of misrepresentation and lies.

Good write up, though.

Sure, like "Mexicans are rapists" was a misrepresentation (he never said those words). And the presumption that Trump is racist. The avalance of misrepresentation of Trump is really quite extraordinary.

Or just yesterday:

""These are shocking and shameful comments from the President of the United States. There is no other word one can use but 'racist'," Mr Colville said."

..in reference to sh*thole countries. Again a preusmption of racism. What's weird in this instance is that democrats often call the US a sh*thole country, but that would then make them racist.

"A certain way of talking" is an awfully clunky way to say trolling etc. Why not just say that?

"and O'Keefe naturally insinuates that she's talking about an official Twitter blacklist of conservative pundits."

Yet she responded to the reference to Cernovich, an alt-righter, with 'shitty people'. hmmmmm.

While O'Keefe may not have proven anything, the leaning of Twitter does seem to be against conservatives.

It's presumption to say that Twitter is going to filter out conservatives but not so presumptuous to say that it's fake news.

No! Twitter is not "against conservatives". They are against hate speech, trolling, and other such anti-social behavior and they're wanting to devise filters (good luck with that, btw) to reduce it. If that happens to clamp a disproportionate amount of conservative speech, well then, what does that tell you?

... if you're just starting out and you have zero knowledge of NLP and zero common sense. I should hope anyone who knows what a computer is can figure out that maybe we can program it to look for words we don't like and have them filtered out, but that that's not enough when you're working with natural language, especially of the kind used on Twitter. I'm working with natural language myself and I can tell you tweets are considered a special category because they generally make about the most liberal use of precisely the things that make natural language so difficult to work with computationally.

I think it's blatantly obvious that the man was trying to impress the woman to anyone with any knowledge of machine learning. Sure, there are probably algorithms that have a certain accuracy that they use to try to filter the stuff, but like I said, it's a really difficult problem, and simple string matching is definitely not the way to go about it. Why do you think they have a team of engineers working on it?

I can pretty much stop reading right at "James O'Keefe." The guy's a dumpster fire of misrepresentation and lies.

Good write up, though.

Sure, like "Mexicans are rapists" was a misrepresentation (he never said those words). And the presumption that Trump is racist. The avalance of misrepresentation of Trump is really quite extraordinary.

Or just yesterday:

""These are shocking and shameful comments from the President of the United States. There is no other word one can use but 'racist'," Mr Colville said."

..in reference to sh*thole countries. Again a preusmption of racism. What's weird in this instance is that democrats often call the US a sh*thole country, but that would then make them racist.

What are you blabbering about? Did you even read the article or just write garbage out of habit without considering it at all?

Hard to believe so many people are ok with corporate censorship. Twitter is designed so if you don't like what someone is saying you simply unfollow them.

The most basic assumption behind the design of the United States government *was* that people were the best ones to decide for themselves what to talk about. We have been throwing ourselves willingly into the arm of wannabe tyrants ever since.

Yeah, O'Keefe and "Project Veritas" are the ones who heavily edit videos on subjects that Right Wingers get triggered by and claim them as truth. Right Wingers eat the stuff up and they will believe those videos even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary (see the Planned Parenthood video by them).

Oh, that was them too? I thought O'keefe merely admired the responsible group's criminal methods and copied them.

As I mentioned on the "knowing how the media works helps resistamce to conspiracy theories," The one amd only "accuser" against Roy Moore to have been caught lying was... one of Project Veritas's sting agents. Before the job mentioned in this article, O'Keefe's previous attack was trying to manufacture the narrative that WaPo and NYT were publishing false stories about Moore with the intent to harm him, by attempting to feed them a false story. WaPo didn't bite.

edit: I was going to link the story, but I see DarthSlack already has it covered.

"A certain way of talking" is an awfully clunky way to say trolling etc. Why not just say that?

"and O'Keefe naturally insinuates that she's talking about an official Twitter blacklist of conservative pundits."

Yet she responded to the reference to Cernovich, an alt-righter, with 'shitty people'. hmmmmm.

While O'Keefe may not have proven anything, the leaning of Twitter does seem to be against conservatives.

It's presumption to say that Twitter is going to filter out conservatives but not so presumptuous to say that it's fake news.

No! Twitter is not "against conservatives". They are against hate speech, trolling, and other such anti-social behavior and they're wanting to devise filters (good luck with that, btw) to reduce it. If that happens to clamp a disproportionate amount of conservative speech, well then, what does that tell you?

Yes they are.

Liberals define everything right of Stalin hate speech

Not surprising really, because by any objective measure Stalin was a far right politician who managed to hijack the Russian Revolution. I could say "conservatives" (they are not conservatives, they are right wing extremists) like to use words like "Stalin", "communism" as attack words because they know their under-educated, easily led audience doesn't know any history and doesn't understand what they mean. (For instance, the Soviet Union was never officially Communist. It had a Communist Party for that precise reason, to bring about communism, but it failed. Yet right wingers still refer to the Soviet Union as "Communists" because they don't know (or care) that USSR meant Union of Workers' Councils Socialist Republics, and socialist is not communist.

"A certain way of talking" is an awfully clunky way to say trolling etc. Why not just say that?

It sounds clunky because O'Keefe ripped it out of context. He was responding to the Project Veritas lady asking whether his plan was to "essentially ban certain mindsets." He responds "it's not going to ban the mindset, it's going to ban, like, a way of talking." And this was a few seconds after he'd talked about banning people who were swearing or being abusive—so it would have been obvious that that was the "way of talking" he was referring to. Seriously, watch the full video (this conversation is around 14:00). It's obvious that the "way of talking" he has in mind has nothing to do with conservatives.

Just go to a random [Trump] tweet, and just look at the followers," Singh says. "They'll be like guns, God, America, like, and with the American flag and like the cross. Who says that? Who talks like that? It's for sure a bot."

If the Twitter engineer really believes that, he needs to visit middle America, the Deep South, or pretty much anywhere with a rural influence.

I know it’s out of context but this smacks of a lack of exposure to people different than him politically.

Seems like a waste of time and money investigating the obvious. Twitter is a liberal outfit so of course they’re more likely to surpress conservative viewpoints.

Do you have any proof of anything? Otherwise, throwing unsubstantiated accusations in the air to damage the reputation of a person or company is awfully close to what Fox News pundits regularly accuse “liberals” of doing. So you must be an evil communist.

Seems like a waste of time and money investigating the obvious. Twitter is a liberal outfit so of course they’re more likely to surpress conservative viewpoints.

Yes, the outfit that banned entire LGBTQ hashtags https://thinkprogress.org/twitter-lgbtq ... 192dbb0fd/ , bans users that quote tweet their abusers but not their abusers, who are slow to ban white nationalists if they ban them at all and who's CEO follows and retweets Nazi sympathisers is 100% liberal.

Seems like a waste of time and money investigating the obvious. Twitter is a liberal outfit so of course they’re more likely to surpress conservative viewpoints.

Prove it.

It’s common sense, liberals hate conservatives so they would jump in every opportunity to ban them from the platform. The reverse would apply if Twitter were a conservative company.

No. By its very definition, liberals are liberal and conservatives are conservative.

liberal (lĭbˈər-əl, lĭbˈrəl)►

adj. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. adj. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.